Tuesday, October 15, 2013

First Impression: Kyoukai no Kanata

Kyoukai
no Kanata follows Akihito Kanbara, a high school sophomore and a half-demon.
One day, he notices that a freshman is about to jump off the school rooftop. As
soon as he stops her from committing suicide, she stabs him with a sword made
from her blood. It turns out that the girl, Mirai Kuriyama, is a demon hunter.
And that is the beginning of their unusual friendship.

From
the very start, what really captures my attention is the animation. It doesn’t
take an expert eye to realize that the art is just gorgeous. The colours are
very vibrant and the details are very intricate. However, this is the only
department that I could praise in solid.

The
story is not that entrancing. It lacks a hook that would attach the viewers to
the show. Aside from that, the exposition is just poorly written. The establishing
of the world is composed of seemingly random interactions between the
characters. These interactions become even more annoying because of the fact
that the characters are generic.

Akihito
Kanbara is just the usual passive student with a little touch of comedy. This
character archetype is very generic in Slice of Life titles. But there’s
nothing more generic than a MOE klutz, which is exactly what Mirai Kuriyama is.
She’s not even the kind of MOE that I could sympathize with. She’s the annoying
kind, much like Fuko Ibuki from Clannad.

The
music is nothing special either. There is no soundtrack that I particularly
like. But what I really like are the action sequences. They are very well-made,
almost to the point that they are eye candy. If anything, they are the
redeeming factor of Kyoukai no Kanata.

The
pilot episode should immediately introduce a trigger that would break the
stasis point. Sure, Kyoukai no Kanata has done this through the demon in Mirai
Kuriyama’s apartment, but it is not a strong enough trigger to grasp the
overall story. The story is just not expounded enough for the viewers to
actually care, and this makes the pilot episode a complete failure. This does
not mean that the story will be bad. I just think that the pilot episode is
very crucial to gain the interest of the viewers. The viewers assume that the
quality of the pilot episode will be the quality of the entire series.

To
be honest, the concept of demons and demon hunters in Kyoukai no Kanata still
has the potential to be interesting. It is just a matter of execution. I will
give this anime a few more episodes to see if it will improve in storytelling
and characterization. How could I not give it a chance, when its animation and
art style is just amazing?

About The Author

You can call me Arvin Saints, but that is not my real name. I use that name in all my legitimate social media accounts. It’s not that I don’t want to directly associate myself to the cyber world. The name is simply an inside joke among my compatriots.